"The largest gathering in recent years of indigenous peoples and their supporters took place in the Paha Sapa (Black Hills) of South Dakota during the baking-hot late summer of 1980.
For those who attended—and participants came from as far afield as Nicaragua, the Pacific, northern Europe, Canada, South America and throughout the United States—it seemed to signify an end to the compartmentalised, often divisive, single-issue movements of the 1970s, and the beginning of new international alliances between previously disparate forces. Red-neck ranchers rubbed shoulders with radical "redskins," white "green movement" activists with native practitioners of alternative technology, militant left-wing political adherents with anarcho-pacifists.
Called the Survival Gathering, and organized by a unique coalition of whites and native Americans (Black Hills Alliance), in a brief six days scores of workshops and plenary sessions were held covering virtually every aspect of land-use, multi-corporate control, political oppression, indigenous self-determination, alternative health, energy and education.
At the opening session of the Gathering, American Indian Movement co-founder John Trudell, in a remarkable address, drew together various strands of the emergent peoples' movements of the last 20 years and put them firmly in the context of an earth-based liberation which indigenous communities have practiced—against tremendous odds—for hundreds of years."
from The Indigenous Voice: Visions and Realities, edited by
Roger Moody
I'd like to thank you all for coming to this place, and I'd like to give thanks
for being welcomed here myself. And I would like to talk tonight in honor of
all of us in the struggle who have lost our relations to the Spirit World. I would
like to talk in honor of the wind, one of the natural elements. This is a survival
gathering and one of the things I hope you all learn while you're here is ... to
appreciate the energy and power that the elements are, tha t of the sun, the rain
and the wind. I hope you go away from here understanding that this is power,
the only real, true power. This is the only real, true connection we will ever
have to power, our relationship to Mother Earth.